Device independent router modeling
Roman Chertov, Sonia Famy, Ness B. Shroff · Annual Information Security Symposium · 2008
Many popular simulation and emulation tools use high-level models of forwarding behavior in switches and routers, and provide little guidance on setting model parameters such as buffer sizes. Thus, a myriad of papers report results that are highly sensitive to the forwarding model or buffer size used. In this paper, we argue that measurement-based models for routers and other forwarding devices are crucial. We devise such a model and validate it with measurements from three types of Cisco routers and one Juniper router, under varying traffic conditions. The structure of our model is device-independent, but requires device-specific parameters. The compactness of the parameter tables and simplicity of the model make it versatile in high-fidelity simulations that preserve simulation scalability. We construct a profiler to infer parameter tables within a few hours. Our preliminary results indicate that our model can approximate different types of routers. Additionally, the results indicate that queue characteristics vary dramatically among the devices we measure, and that backplane contention must be modeled.